Salad Days
by Musamea
Summary: Never accuse a Gilmore of not appreciating a meal. A handful of lunchtime vignettes featuring Lorelai.
1. Nine and Fifty Swans

**Title:** Salad Days  
**Author: **Musamea  
**Summary:** Never accuse a Gilmore of not appreciating a meal. A handful of lunchtime vignettes featuring Lorelai.

For Robin, who's quite possibly read every single book ever written. Good luck on finals, m'dear.

* * *

**Disclaimer:** Amy Sherman-Palladino owns _The Gilmore Girls_. Technically, "The Wild Swans at Coole" own themselves, but Yeats owns at least half of our Romantic conception of them. I own nothing, not even stale Pop-Tarts.  
**Warnings:** Minor suggestivity and a fade-to-black.

* * *

1. Nine and Fifty Swans 

He brings the motorcycle to a sudden, lurching stop that makes her shriek with delight and squeeze her arms around his waist to keep her balance.

"Careful, woman," he says over his shoulder, half-shouting to be heard over the bike's engine. "I can't breathe." He wheezes a couple of times to prove his point.

She sticks her tongue out at him, then laughs when she remembers that he can't see her. "Sorry." She pulls her hands away from him and takes off her helmet, shaking her hair free. He watches her for an instant too long and a flush creeps up her cheeks.

They turn from each other at the same moment – he to kill the engine and palm the keys, she to swing one long leg over the side of the Harley and nudge the kickstand into place with a booted foot.

She stretches, still feeling a ghost of the metal humming between her thighs. "Better than sex," she declares, directing a fond grin at the bike.

Christopher quirks one eyebrow up. "That's because you haven't had sex with me yet."

Again, with the blushing! She wonders if she can get all the blood vessels in her cheeks surgically removed. "Huh, in your dreams, mister. Only reason I let you near me is 'cause I think you've got a hot set of wheels."

He tucks the keys into his jacket pocket and reaches out for her, hooking his index fingers through the belt loops of her jeans. When he pulls her close, she's suddenly aware of her heartbeat and his breathing. "Is that so?"

She shoots him a defiant look. "Uh-huh."

He smiles (his "James Dean smile" her best friend Sarah calls it). "You break my heart, Miss Gilmore," he drawls, before dipping his head down and brushing the corner of her mouth with his lips. He waits just long enough to let her know it's no accident that his mouth is on hers (about four seconds, or the time it takes her to forget everything she knows about breathing), then lets her go.

"So, this whole picnic thing..." He waves a hand at the basket tied to the back of his bike and sends her an inquiring glance. His face is once more the picture of innocence, but a smile lurks at the corners of his lips and the dimples in his cheek. He is unreasonably pleased at having rendered her speechless.

Her throat is dry, and she has to clear it twice before she can find her voice. "A blanket and some food _al fresco_. It's not exactly rocket science."

"I wasn't asking about the _mechanics_ of the business," he says loftily, "just what the hell kind of appeal you see in it. My parents used to do this when I was a kid and all I remember is lots of bug bites and ants getting into my food. I don't think I'm going to like this much." He crosses his arms and looks at her dubiously.

"Silly boy, that's because you've never had a picnic with _me_ before."

He smiles, a little, to hear an incarnation of his own words used against him. "So, enlighten me."

* * *

She does, as much as she is able with a hokey checkered blanket and food that she didn't prepare. ("You didn't pack this?" he asks, with a gleam of mischief in his eyes. "Are you kidding me? If I'd done it, you'd be eating stale Pop-Tarts.") The feast in the basket, their view of the park bursting into bloom, and the cool breeze kicking off the lake help immensely with improving Christopher's estimation of outdoor dining. 

But it's her, mostly. She hasn't a speck of makeup on, not after declaring to him some weeks ago "It's just _you_" when he teased her about not dressing up to see a movie with him. She's not one of those perky little blonde cheerleaders he's always gone for; she stands eye-to-eye with him in her bare feet, and shoes make her ever so slightly taller than him; she has no housekeeping skills to recommend her... and still he can't keep his eyes off her.

Twice during their meal he wipes entirely imaginary smudges of dressing from her chin, and her stomach does crazy little gymnastics every time he smiles at her.

She's not sure if she should worry about the state of their friendship or the state her favorite T-shirt is going to be in if she lets him go any further. She's been around the bases several times, with various boyfriends, but this is _Christopher_ and she suspects that a night of junk food and Humphrey Bogart movies won't quite solve her problems if the two of them don't work out.

* * *

A pair of swans breaks out of the foliage and flaps to the water in a flurry of white wings and honking. They are clumsy until they land, when they are suddenly transformed into a graceful and placid image like that on a set of Emily's best and most clichéd china. 

Christopher murmurs a couple lines from Yeats, and Lorelai pauses in her cleaning. She knows better than to be impressed; Mr. Palowski has always made his English classes memorize poetry for the final. She twists around to look at her companion. He's sprawled on his back, leaning up on his elbows, and at this angle his face is all cheekbones and shadowed hollows. He looks like Byron and she's impressed in spite of herself.

"I always wanted to know what happened to the sixtieth swan," she says softly.

"Hmm?" He reaches out and tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers linger, warm and inviting, where her jaw curves into her neck.

"The poem is about 'nine and fifty swans,'" she explains. "That leaves one swan odd. What do you think happened to its partner?"

He purses his lips, tilts his head to one side, and makes a great show of thinking. "Her boyfriend died because she'd never let him touch her. So now she's all alone."

So, not quite Byron after all, at least not in the poetic sense. A small pang of disappointment twinges through her, and all of a sudden she knows that the two of them will never get past this level of communication. They've gotten too used to – and dependent upon – their particular brand of banter to ever allow each other anything more serious.

She doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry at this thought, so she snorts at his remark instead. "Did this boyfriend of hers happen to own a leather jacket and drive a Harley way too fast?"

He smiles cheekily. "That's the one, except you forgot to mention that she never said she wanted him to slow down."

"Silly girl."

"Very."

He scoots closer to her purposefully. "So, Gilmore, are you just going to let me swim off to my death? No kind words or caring looks?" His arm slips around her waist.

"Are you trying to seduce me, Mr. Hayden?" she asks, resisting the steady pressure of his arm and its invitation to lie down.

"I don't know." He picks up her left hand and kisses it, palm up. "Do you think I'm capable of that?" His lips are warm against the inside of her wrist and the rapid flutter of her pulse beneath the fragile skin.

"I'm not sure I'm thinking right now," she admits, running the fingers of her free hand through his hair.

He smiles softly at her, suddenly serious. "C'mon, Lor. It's 'just' me, remember?"

"Yeah, that's what scares me." This time, she leans over and kisses him. It's warm, and wet, and still wonderfully unfamiliar despite the two make-out sessions they've had on her balcony. He deepens the kiss quickly, and when he pulls her into his arms, she can feel his heart thudding in his chest. Her own has moved to somewhere that's simultaneously in the vicinity of her throat and her stomach, and when the kiss ends, she finds herself on her back.

"So," he murmurs, "is this gonna be the first time in our lives that you tell me to slow down?"

It's actually a question, and she thinks that he'll probably let her up if she nods her head. But she doesn't want to, consequences and favorite T-shirt be damned.

When a full minute has passed and she still hasn't answered, he says, "I promise you, it'll be better than riding the Harley."

She smiles. There is, after all, very little that several evenings spent with Humphrey Bogart can't fix. "So... enlighten me."


	2. The Moon, and Memory, and Muchness

**Disclaimer: **Amy Sherman-Palladino owns _The Gilmore Girls_. Lewis Carroll owns the idea of "A Mad Tea Party." I own nothing, except for a love of Keats and two small winks at Cadenza.  
**Warnings:** A wee bit of cursing.

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2. The Moon, and Memory, and Muchness 

"... we were pissed out of our minds, man! It was so awesome; at one point, Rob..."

"... new lipstick, what do you think..."

"... going to Yale... you know, the one with the fuzzy hair..."

"... God, Fischer's Biology test was _such_ a killer..."

"... my house on Saturday..."

Lorelai sits silently and nudges at her suspicious-looking school lunch with the tip of her plastic fork. The menu today is ostensibly "succulent pot roast; creamy mashed potatoes; and fresh carrots." The stuff on her tray tastes like tin metal sautéed with dead rat.

It's always nice to know that her tuition dollars are being put to good use.

She sneaks a glance around the table. Most of the other girls are neglecting the euphemistically labeled cafeteria food as well, whether because they want to achieve Kate Moss's cheekbones or because they're just too busy planning their weekend dates or trying to sneak glimpses at the new teacher with the strategic placement of their tarnished spoons. So young and handsome! _And_ he could quote _poetry_, or so the rumor went. Lorelai rolls her eyes to herself. Most of her classmates wouldn't know Keats if he bit them in the ankle.

_What the hell am I going to do?_ she wonders, for the millionth time since that morning, when the thin blue line appeared before her eyes.

She'd ridden the bus to the next town and bought the pregnancy test at an impersonal convenience store, wearing dark glasses over her eyes and her plainest ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. Her "Don't notice me; nothing out of the usual here; I'm an old married lady" act would probably have benefited from an overprotective and excited male companion, but she hadn't been about to tell Chris – not until she was sure.

Well, she's sure now, as sure as two missed periods and swollen breasts and morning (and afternoon and evening) sickness and an accuracy rate of ninety-nine point nine percent can make a person.

_Couldn't it be stress, PMS, a stomach virus, that last tenth of a percent?_ her mind pleads. _Couldn't it be something else, someone else? Can't I go back? Can't I shift to another line of probability?_

She drops her fork and sneaks her hand below the table to press it, palm down, to her stomach. Nothing. No swelling hardness, no suspicious lump of heel or elbow, no kick of constrained limbs. It's too early for any of the signs centered around the womb, of course.

Too early to believe – _really_ believe – that this is happening to her.

She believes anyway. And not because (well, not _only_ because) of two missed periods and plastic pee sticks and the faint taste of bile in the back of her throat. She closes her eyes, remembers sunlight and laughter and the scent of grass, thinks of the garishly colored diagrams displayed in the glossy pages of Biology books, sees a small fist, translucent and tinted red by forming blood vessels, sees a nose, the shape of a chin, blue eyes.

"Lorelai!"

Her eyes fly open, and she gasps a little for breath. Janet Miller's concerned face swims into focus.

"Hey, Gilmore, you okay?"

_O what can ail thee, knight at arms,  
__So haggard and so woe-begone?_

She tries to smile reassuringly; her left hand sketches vaguely at the air. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just spaced out a little there."

"Okay. As I was saying, my parents said we could have the cabin the first week of Winter Break. Do you want to come?"

"Yes... no! I mean-" One of Janet's perfectly tweezed eyebrows inches upward. "- I mean I'll have to check with my parents. I think we may have family coming for the holidays... or they might want to go away... or something." _Or I'm going to be six months pregnant, which sort of puts a damper on the skiing._

"Well, let me know as soon as you can."

"Uh-huh." Lorelai wonders how long the invitation will stand after word gets out that Emily and Richard Gilmore's girl went and got herself knocked up. Emily and Richard...

Her mind shies away from the prospect of telling her parents and sitting through their reactions. (She already knows how it will go. They will make her feel very young and stupid. They will contemplate disowning her, selling her off in marriage to some lecherous old billionaire who needs an heir, sending her to a convent. _How the hell could you do this to us? We're ruined! What about your education? How dare you throw away your opportunities! What am I supposed to tell my business associates? What am _I_ going to say to the ladies at the next Daughters of the American Revolution tea? It's your fault, it's your fault, it's your fault._)

She already feels very young at the thought of the confrontation. And she also feels old beyond her years, sitting here with a bunch of teenage girls with no further thought in their heads than their latest shopping acquisitions and their current grade-point averages.

"Oh my God!" Caryn Peters squawks, "Mr. Gilliland just looked in this direction!"

"He's _so_ dreamy," Lynn Anderson sighs. "I want to have his baby."

Lorelai wonders what would happen if she just stood up, right now, in the middle of the cafeteria, and screamed at the top of her lungs.

_They'll think I've lost my mind_, she thinks, with grim amusement, _and cart me off to some modern-day equivalent of Bedlam, where a doctor with halitosis and dead office plants will look me over and shake his head solemnly, saying, "Poor dear; her humours are all out of joint because she is with child. There's nothing we can do." And my mother will sob quietly – but possibly with relief – in the background._

She shoves her chair back from the table, causing a dozen perfectly coiffed heads to turn in her direction. Before she can stammer out an explanation, the bell rings and the cafeteria erupts in a flurry of activity. She lingers, making a show of digging for something in her bag, until the large room is cleared of students.

The late bell rings as she makes her way down the deserted halls.

_What little town by river or sea shore,  
__Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,  
__Is emptied of this folk, this piteous morn?_

She finds a bathroom, heaves up what little lunch she'd managed to get down, and rinses out her mouth. When she lifts her face to the mirror, her reflection frightens her. She's much paler than cooling weather and the meticulously bred Gilmore line can account for; the skin around her eyes is taut and tired.

She reaches into her bag and fumbles for a compact, then stops.

"I'm pregnant," she says to her reflection. The girl on the other side of the glass nods at her. "I'm going to have a baby." Her pulse speeds up, and she repeats the words, her voice growing louder. "I'm going to have a baby. And..." she draws a deep breath, (_No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist / Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for it's poisonous wine..._) "and I'm going to be fair to this kid-" (_Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd / By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine..._) "-I'm going to be _happy_ about this." (_Make not your rosary of yew-berries/ Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be / Your mournful Psyche..._)

She smiles wanly at herself after this manifesto.

Then she bursts into tears.


End file.
